


Puppies!

by thraxios (orphan_account)



Category: Fallout 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-14
Updated: 2012-08-14
Packaged: 2017-11-12 02:50:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/485838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/thraxios
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charon gets his vaultie a gift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Puppies!

It’d been a week. A whole week, and she hadn’t even seen fit to crawl out of bed. She just lay there, curled up with the dog’s corpse, with its side all torn open and half its guts hanging out and its ribcage splintered and broken like the bones were just brittle little twigs under her boots. Charon thought it was disgusting, but she’d made it clear she didn’t give a damn what Charon thought about her grieving process. The dog had been with her for ages before Charon came along, had helped her take down raiders and super mutants and Enclave soldiers; his happy little face was the first thing she’d seen after waking up in the Citadel, a couple weeks after activating the purifier.

And now the ol’ dog was dead. Ripped nearly in half by a deathclaw that had got a face-full of flame and lead not two seconds later. It was real quiet now, too, what with the harsh panting and click-click-click of nails on metal gone. But Charon just didn’t see the point of just  _laying in bed_  with the damn thing.

Which was probably why she sent him out on the seventh day, screaming at him to stop his muttering and pacing and just to get out and go do something useful for a change, why don’t you? So Charon had obeyed - like he had a choice - and left the old ramshackle house that surprisingly hadn’t fallen down yet. He ended up listening to Confessor Cromwell ramble on about the A-bomb, then being followed around by a couple little kids, and getting booted out of Moriarty’s while the old Irishman yelled at him in his weird accent.

Nice place, Megaton.

Lucas Simms found him about a half-hour later, when he’d just given up on finding anything ‘useful’ to do and had plopped down on one of the gangways, letting his legs dangle over the edge while he watched the little people below him mill around, not doing anything real important. The sheriff leaned against the railing, lowering the brim of his hat a little when the sun glanced off the metal rooftops.

“She still with that dog?” Simms asked; he’d been one of the few who’d seen her and Charon creep in during the night, carrying that mutilated mass of flesh and fur, and he’d had the good graces just to nod and go on his way.

“Yuh,” was Charon’s intelligent response.

“She kick you out?”

“Yuh.”

“Looking for something to do?”

“Yuh.”

“She don’t keep you around for conversation, does she?” Simms pushed away from the railing and adjusted his hat until he could look down at the ghoul, who hadn’t moved a lick since the sheriff had come over. “Well, I got something you can do for me. C’mon.” Charon got to his feet and trudged after Simms, down the gangway and to the wings that made up Megaton’s gates. A brahmin sat there, making its weird little mooing noises, with crates piled on its back and bags slung over its sides.

“Usually Moriarty goes out and gets what the vault kids trade us for,” Simms explained. “But you know I don’t trust him far as I can throw him, and I’m pretty sure he’s nicking some of the more valuable stuff. So while the kid’s got you kicked out, I figure you can lead this brahmin down to the vault, unload it, then load it back with whatever they set out for us. Yeah?”

Charon nodded. “Beats sitting ‘round here,” he said, and took the brahmin’s lead, holding fast as the mutated cow tried to skitter away when the wings opened up. When it calmed down some, Charon pulled it through the gate, then around the high walls that surrounded Megaton, angling towards where he remembered the vault to be.

It wasn’t a long walk, and Charon and his new brahmin-buddy were only interrupted by a couple of raiders, but a shotgun blast to the face usually does good with scaring off raiders. Or outright killing them. Charon preferred the latter, but if he wasn’t getting bothered by them anymore it was just fine. So he and his cargo made it just fine to the vault, where, like Simms had said, there were crates and bags laid out just a few feet from the rickety wooden door that hid the huge metal door. Charon went to work unloading crates and setting them aside.

“Yip yip!”

He stopped.  _Yip yip_  usually wasn’t a sound that brahmin made, and  _he_  sure as hell hadn’t said it. Charon looked around, expecting one of the vaulties to be hiding behind a rock or something, making little doggy noises at him. But there was no one there, far as he could tell, so he figured he was just hearing things. Weeks of listening to Dogmeat yap and yap must’ve ingrained the noise into his mind. Charon shook his head and got back to work.

“Yip! Woof! Yip yip!”

He stopped again. Looked around. Still nothing. Back to work.

This time the high-pitched yipping was accompanied by a slight push at the back of Charon’s legs, like two paws putting themselves on the back of his calves to get his attention. The ghoul moved quickly, half-spinning to move away from the noise-maker, and the puppy fell to the ground with a puff of dirt and expelled breath.

A puppy.

A puppy that looked a whole lot like Dogmeat.

Dogmeat’s puppy?

The little mongrel got its wobbly legs underneath it and wagged its tail like it was a propeller and it was going to lift right into the air with it. It lowered his front half to the ground, wiggled its butt, and leapt at Charon’s boots.

Charon sidestepped, and the puppy went sprawling in the dirt again. While it lay there, tongue lolling out of its mouth and legs splayed to all corners of the wasteland, Charon finally unloaded the rest of the crates and bags and got them set up nice and neat right outside the vault. When he put the vaulties’ half of the trade back on the brahmin and took its lead again, pulling it down the hill towards the broken road, the puppy yipped and ran right after him.

He stopped and stared at it. It sat back and stared up at him with wide, adorable puppy eyes that not even a brainwashed, murdering, trigger-happy, rotten-fleshed ghoul could ignore. And Charon tried to ignore it, he really did. He used all his manly willpower and tried to dig up some feral part of his irradiated mind that would let him ignore the blatant puppy adorableness.

The puppy sat there and grinned up at him.

Charon snapped and bent down, scooping the puppy up in his arms and pressing his cheek into the puppy’s warm fur. It licked him, flakes and chunks of skin coming off on its wet tongue, but that didn’t bother it none; it kept licking and nuzzling and scrabbling its too-big paws until Charon’s cheek was just a red layer of raw, exposed muscle.

The puppy wasn’t big, and Charon could cradle it in the crook of one arm without much difficulty. He did exactly that, and when he returned to Megaton, Simms raised the brim of his hat and leaned in close to peer at the little mutt.

“That part of the trade?” he asked, expecting to hear another “Yuh,” but Charon shook his head and handed the brahmin’s lead to him, then nearly ran up the gangways that led to his vaultie’s house. A ghoul in a hurry is not generally something you want to get in the way of, so many people - including Moriarty - nearly jumped over the railing to get out of Charon’s path. He reached her house unhindered, and held the puppy by the scruff of its neck, hiding it behind his back so that it sort of sat in the palm of his other hand.

Which left Charon in a dilemma, with both hands holding the pup and no way to open the door. Knocking would be useless; she’d just yell at him to go away and all that bad stuff. So Charon opted to do the obvious: he backed up a step, and kicked the door in.

His vaultie sat up so quickly he thought he was going to shoot him or throw Dogmeat’s body at him. She did neither, instead just muttering something along the lines of, “Thought I toldja to git,” albeit much more colorfully. She started to lay back down, but Charon crossed the room and jumped onto the big, heart-shaped bed, nearly toppling backwards. But he kept his balance - barely - and hoped the puppy would keep quiet long enough.

“Got a present for ya’.” Charon said, in a way that  _Go on, guess,_  was heavily implied. She sat up, crossed her legs, and rested her chin on her palms.

“Dunno. Grenades.”

“Nah.”

“Simms’ hat.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Dammit, Charon, I dunno, what?”

The puppy managed to wiggle out of Charon’s relaxed grip, and it bounded around him, almost falling over with every step it took on the bouncy bed. The vaultie’s eyes got narrow, then widened until it looked like they’d fall right out of her pretty little head. The puppy bounced onto her lap and she picked it up, looking it up and down.

“Looks just like Dogmeat,” she said after a few seconds’ evaluation.

“Think it’s his puppy.”

“You liar.”

“Am not.”

She set the puppy back down on the bed real careful, like it was made of some fragile glass and would break if it was even slightly jarred. The puppy proved that theory wrong by jumping around some more and promptly bouncing itself right off the bed, taking its daddy’s corpse with it, and landing in a heap, tangled up with sheets and limbs and guts. Looked pretty happy about it, too.

A moment’s silence, then Charon was tackled off the bed by his employer, and they both ended up as tangled as the puppy, but with less sheets and guts. Anyway, she squealed, all high-pitched and just plain  _happy,_ and Charon’s breath was crushed out of him as she flailed around, trying to get up to play with her new companion. The puppy didn’t help at all; it got untangled first, and bounded right over to her and Charon, plopping its little butt down on Charon’s chest and refusing to move until it was manhandled out of the way by the ghoul, who nearly got his face stepped on his vaultie climbed over him and went on in pursuit of the pup.

He’d meant for the damn thing to make her happy, not for it to make her step all over him. But at least she wasn’t being all mopey over something that wasn’t ever coming back. Unless you count reincarnation. That pup was as happy and lovey as Dogmeat had been.

Speaking of which.

Charon nudged the dead dog’s body with the toe of his boot. “Whaddya want me to do with this?” he asked, not too keen on touching it but knowing that was exactly was she was going to tell him to do. And, like magic, she stopped playing with the puppy long enough to say, “Take him out and bury him.”

So Charon did. He picked the corpse up, holding it as far from his body as he could, and wobbled towards the door that was still thrown open - the little kids who’d followed him around earlier were there, looking like they wanted to play with the pup, too. Charon stumbled past them and managed to make it down the gangways without really hurting anyone, and the gates opened for them like they always did. He laid Dogmeat’s body down and, with no shovel with which to dig, opted to lay the biggest rocks he could find over the dog, more or less like a tomb.

When that was done, and he’d wiped his hands off as best he could, the gates slid open for him for the fourth time in so many hours, and he trudged back to the house, only to find his vaultie and the dog sprawled out on the bed, both looking pretty much asleep. When Charon started up the stairs to the house’s second level, his employer made a sound that was somewhere between a snort and a snore and a choke, and she sat up, the puppy rolling off her chest and not even waking up.

“Charon!” she yelled, her eyes barely open, not enough to see him through her eyelashes. “Me and - and -” Yawn. “Me and Little Meat have decided that when you die, Little Meat is gonna find me a baby ghoul to take your place. ‘Kay?” And with that, she flopped back down and went to sleep.

Baby ghouls. That’d be a sight. A… weird sight… probably scary…

Now Charon couldn’t get the image of a rotten little baby tottering around out of his head.

He does something nice for her, and this is how she repays him. Tackling him and stepping on his face and making him bury dead dogs and finally putting weird things in his imagination.

...

What a nice kid.


End file.
